The Daily Lard, with feeling 10-6-10

Douglas LeeOct 6, 2010 8:40 AM

Good Morning, Broncos fans! If I may, I’d like to take a moment to offer something of a reality check on the Kyle-Orton-Sucks-McDaniels-is-an-Idiot-Oh-Wait-Orton’s-Good-Vote-for-Kyle-for-MVP Train. Indeed, Kyle is off to a very good start this year, his grasp of the McDaniels offense is certainly better than it was last year, and he’s spreading the ball around quite well. He’s racking up the yardage and breaking records. But he’s got a long way to go. Despite his 175 attempts (an almost unprecedented crazy number), Orton has only 6 touchdown passes (tied for 8th best) with a TD rate of 3.4% (tied for 20th with Joe Flacco). That TD percentage will need to go up - and in a big way - before Kyle Orton is an elite QB, even for a season.

Now, this is something of a rant-laden Lard today. Clearly this is not an everyday thing, but as you know, when things get my goat, I tend to rant. Just ask the guys I work with what happens when they start talking about certain baseball players being “clutch” or “winners”...but I digress. Let’s get to those sand-in-my-shorts links!

Broncos/Titans/Ravens

Ted Bartlett explains why football players are not fungible, how and why the Broncos have been building their offense the way they have over the past 21 months, the much-criticized running game, blocking schemes, misinformed tweets and football columns, and well…just read it. You’ll learn quite a bit, as always. Thanks for this, Ted.

Solomon Wilcots sings the praises of Orton on Playbook. Either he didn’t mention anything about Josh McDaniels being an idiot for trading away Jay Cutler, or they didn’t include that part in this video clip. It’s probably the former, but I’ll give Solly the benefit of the doubt…

Here’s one of the more ridiculous segments you’ll see. Steve Wyche supposedly gets to the bottom of Orton’s accusations against Cortland Finnegan & Co. But really, there’s just a lot of dismissals and denials, and nobody says “Hey, that video actually shows a pretty blatant cheap shot.” I’m guessing Wyche wants to make sure he can score an interview with Jeff Fisher later this week.

Fortunately, there must have been an avalanche of email/Tweet responses to PK’s half-assed revisiting of the Cutler/Orton trade (funny we can call it now rather than just the Cutler trade, right?), because he reversed course yesterday. Well, sort of. I have no idea whether the Todd who wrote in is one of our readers, but if so, well done Todd! What results is something of another backhanded response, where PK spends his time writing about Alphonso Smith (quel surprise). But perhaps he just thought that Todd had put it so well (and knew better than he) that he needn’t get into the details of Ayers’ and DT’s performances thus far. Or, maybe that’s as close to getting a “You’re right, I was really being lazy as I wrote that,” from someone like Peter King and we should be happy with it…

Ryan Harris and Brandon Lloyd were on CBS4 and spoke about Harris’ health and the Titans’ dirtiness.

Oh, there’s another game this week? Right, sorry. Here are the goods from the Broncos’ weekly press release.

The Broncos will be hitting hard in practice this week to prepare for the always-physical Ravens.

Legwold says the Broncos’ issues on special teams lie with the kick coverage more than the kickers.

The Dolphins fired their ST coach after a MNF performance that included giving up three touchdowns in the kicking game.

Chase Stuart includes Kyle Orton and Brandon Lloyd among his breakout players of the season’s first quarter.

Orton was only fifth this week in DYAR as a result of his poor third-down performance. Laurence Maroney gets the nod for least-valuable RB; Eddie Royal the third-most valuable WR. Meanwhile, the Broncos are not really improving according to DVOA.

So much for the fashionable practice of picking teams that finished the prior season on a hot streak. After all, that was one of the dumber ways to go. As if momentum carries over through a 7-month layoff. Whether the idea of momentum from week to week in a sport like football is even possible is something I we don’t have time to get into here…

Related

Excellent article Ted! Why the idea that football players are not fungible escapes so many I haven&#8217t a clue. It&#8217s not that hard of an idea to grasp. I think you put it best when you said, &#8220Heâs not a guy who should be in a limited-use role in a pass-heavy offense. McDaniels did Hillis a favor by sending him out.&#8221

It&#8217s funny to see Peter King try to back-peddal out of his lazy and uninformed comment about our draft haul from the Cutler deal. He starts stammering about A Smith when he wasn&#8217t even a part of the Cutler trade haul.

@Drewthorn: The Moss trade makes sense if you look longer-term at the deal rather than at how it effects the Pats this season. The Pats were not willing to give Moss another big contract extension and realized that if they didn&#8217t trade him he would walk for nothing. They got Moss in his prime for a 4th round pick, used his services for 4 years and then traded him for a 3rd rounder on the backend of his career. Makes sense to me.

This is a move made with the long term rather than the short term in mind. They bought low, got good production for several seasons, and then sold at a higher value than they paid for. Excellent move IMO.

Posted by c_style on 2010-10-06 17:13:44

Even if it&#8217s not a perfect response, I do give props to Peter King for admitting his goof. That wasn&#8217t mine he answered directly but was basically the same question and point I&#8217d made to King via a couple of tweets, and I know others of you here also wrote him, so we can all collectively feel proud we got him to do a &#8220mea culpa&#8221 if not a couple of Hail Marys too. Hey, it&#8217s progress, at least, right? And John Clayton would have just ignored us.

Posted by underdog on 2010-10-06 16:27:57

Great Lard. Thanks Doug

I especially liked to see Paul Krueger out for our game. That is huge IMO with Trevor having gone to Jets. Krueger was to be his replacement. Now there could be one less force of disruption to deal with.

On Orton, I think it&#8217s fair to criticize his TDs, but I think the team hasn&#8217t hit its stride yet (scoring wise). Whether this game or vs Jets, I think we&#8217ll be pleasantly surprised.

Posted by Orange and Blue on 2010-10-06 16:12:13

Yesterday I asked what is wrong with the running game? Today Ted answered it. Basically you have 3 starters that are not 100% and has missed significant practice time. 2 rookie starters 1 being the center and another rookie with significant playing time. For this reason the blocking schemes has been dumbed down. So when there is a FB in play the defense just needs to erun where he is going and that is why when the RB gets to the hole the whole defense is there. I suspect that the practice in pads this week is to advance to a new level in blocking schemes. I wouldn&#8217t be surprised to see less FB and more passes on 1st down this week. Then again I might be clueless.

Posted by sleepyteak on 2010-10-06 15:54:33

Moss to the Vikings !

I&#8217m surprised all they got was a 3rd tbh.

Posted by Jenna Talia on 2010-10-06 14:51:47

I love your first sentence. Broncos fans remind me of the teenage boy who unrelentingly bad mouths a pretty girl right up to the moment that she maybe smiles at him, at which point he proceeds to paint his notebook with her initials and starts working through possible names for their children (I admit it, I am remarkably familiar with that adolescent phenomena for a reason). I suppose it&#8217s the nature of fandome, but Denver fans seem particularly keen on always operating at the extremes. As for Orton&#8217s building momentum with the media, that is entirely predictable. Those guys do the extraordinarily tangible well; it&#8217s the reading between the lines and projecting that ties them in knots. What&#8217s a bummer is that if Orton settles down into being merely ordinary, all those that have become hysterical over his success will try to compensate by being more critical than ever of the guy.

On other matters, I don&#8217t quite get the Moss trade. My layman eyes tell me that the Moss type is a key ingredient for the Patriot offense, and that his presence alone did as much for the careers of Welker and Faulk as anything. I guess time will tell if Brandon Tate is up to the task keeping defenses honest underneath.

Posted by Drewthorn on 2010-10-06 14:46:11

Lombardi has a great point about the Colts there, that echoes one of my fundamental tenets of football. Only trust the defense if it objectively deserves to be trusted today.

I wrote something about that on MHR last year, vis-a-vis the Steelers/Packers game, where Mike Tomlin didn&#8217t trust his defense, and said after the game that he he had 3 quarters of evidence that the Steelers could score on the Packers, and the Packers could score on the Steelers, so trusting either defense should have been out the window. That day, Tomlin won the game for the Steelers with some gutsy calls. Sunday, Jim Caldwell helped lose it for the Colts.

Posted by Ted Bartlett on 2010-10-06 14:42:50

Wow. Makes sense for the Vikings&#8212things are going to get ugly for them soon. I thought the Williamses were younger than they are.

My math for next year has the Pats with two firsts, two seconds, three thirds and two fourths. Belichick&#8217s track record in the draft has been trending downwards, but with that many choices even Richie Kotite could build a killer team.

Thanks, Doug. I agree fully that Orton isn&#8217t there yet b/c the touchdowns (although that&#8217s also a lot on the line). But FBO&#8217s low DVOA for the defense puzzles me. I have to chalk it up to small sample sizes early in the season. I am very confident that the Broncos defense is in fact better than 28th in the league.

Posted by Chibronx on 2010-10-06 13:21:43

Thanks Doug.

Great read as always.

Posted by Boydy2669 on 2010-10-06 12:38:54

Doug: Willie McGee is the all time winner in my book. Great work today, man I am so glad you are back doing this. No one does it better or even close to as good!